ABSTRACT
The history of citizenship in India has been linked to migration patterns, identity & balance of the center and periphery, especially in the northeastern region of India, namely, Assam. The Assam Accord of 1985, the revising of the National Register of Citizens (NRC),&Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 2019 stand as three major interventions that prompt and attempt to address illegal migration. However, these initiatives raise a multitude of inter-related questions about the nature of the constitution as a framework for federalism, as well as the nature of the balance between the fundamental right to equality & constitutional right to secularism & rule of law. This research looks at the intersection of these coalitions, and provides legal and implementation challenges, and constitutional vacuum. This research argues that the Assam Accord, as a negotiated federal settlement to the region’s needs is the NRC process & CAA, which violates the federal spirit, consequent to equal and secular constitutionalism. This research, along with the critiques of judicial theory and practices, reflects the growing citizenship jurisprudence in India and its broader implications for the federalism of the country.
Keywords – Assam Accord, National Register of Citizens, Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, Constitutional Federalism, Illegal Immigration, Equality, Secularism, Northeast India
INTRODUCTION
The juristic meaning of citizenship is a formal legal status that defines the mutual relationship between an individual & State, an enforceable bundle of rights, obligations, immunities and liabilities, and simultaneously a sense of political and civic belonging that is intangible, yet at the same time significant. In the terms of the Indian constitution, citizenship has not been an unchanging concept since the beginning of time; the concept has undergone a process of gradual evolution over time, influenced by the provisions of the constitution, legislative enactments, executive interventions, all responsive to the changing socio-political needs of the times. The dynamics of cross-border migration, where patterns of movement have been both outward and inward, initially, of East Pakistan, and then, of Bangladesh, have created a long-standing demographic panic, struggles over identity and even, instances of socio-political instability making the question of citizenship all the more complex and contentious.[1]
The unrest in Assam, which was mainly initiated by student groups between 1979 and 1985, was a prolonged political mobilization against the perceived infiltration of illegal migrants and its effects upon the cultural and electoral sovereignty of the indigenous people. This movement finally led towards the Assam Accord, a tripartite agreement between the representatives of the agitators & Government. The Accord was aimed at institutionalizing a mechanism for dealing with the problem of illegal immigration by prescribing a certain temporal limit. To be precise, it declared March 24, 1971, as the cut-off date, thus stipulating that any individuals who entered Assam after this date would be liable to detection and deportation as per law. The normative framework of the Accord was then incorporated into the statutory regime through the introduction of a new section, Section 6A, the new section carving out a new exception to apply exclusively to Assam. This provision was an effective regularization of the position of certain categories of migrants who had entered the State before the stipulated cut-off date and, therefore, established a differentiated legal regime within the overall national law on citizenship.[2]
Despite its official inclusion into statutory law, the process of the Assam Accord enforcement was uneven over the course of several decades, which has led to the continued uncertainty and dissatisfaction with the process of the Assam Accord enforcement. Only in 2019, when the renewed institutional attention was paid to these issues, especially in the context of the implementation of the CAA, 2019 in Assam, and judicial recommendations to update the NRC. The citizenship scheme proposed by the CAA, 2019 provided a new framework of granting citizenship that was based upon a set of specified criteria such as a revised cut-off date & identification of particular religious groups, namely, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Christians, originating in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. By introducing a differentiated categorization which operates in parallel with the already existing regime under Sec. 6A of the Citizenship Act, 1955, the enactment introduced a differentiated categorization, which is now coexisting with the already existing regime under Sec. 6A of Act, 1955.[3]
The combination of these legal measures, i.e., the provisions of the Assam Accord in the form of the Sec. 6A, the process of updating the NRC & statutory framework proposed by the CAA, 2019, begs some serious constitutional questions with regards to the structure and functioning of the Indian Union. Particularly, these developments imply that the horizontal relationship between citizens inter se & vertical relationship between individuals & State should be critically examined in connection with the principles of equality, secularism and federalism. The visible inconsistencies and overlaps between the two regimes raise a question of whether the two can be reconciled within the constitutional fabric that exists in India or whether there are normative inconsistencies which arise because of these regimes.
[1] Pervez Rahman, “The Citizenship Amendment Act and its Correspondence with the Assam Accord and the NRC: A Constitutional Analysis”, Journal of Legal Studies & Research, 9(1), 79 (2023).
[2]Id.
[3] Id.